1. Create a Google Gadget.
   You can create Google Gadgets such as a countdown timer (to an event), a list (of ideas, suggestions, products, etc), a microblog (what you’re doing or working on) or a YouTube channel (videos about your company, service or product), then publish it on the Google network for other people to add to their customized iGoogle page. You can also email the Gadget link to a list of people.  
2. Post comments on related articles.
   Many news sites or ezines include an option to leave comments at the end of articles. Some like CNN even track backlinks from blogs that link to the article. Search for articles related to your company’s business, then post an intelligent response or comment on the article, including your company’s name, URL and/or email address, if possible. 
3. Write a press release.
   Your press release can be about anything, but should be tied to something timely such as a recent event or announcement. Many sites such as the ones cited here offer a free press release service. 
4. Create a Facebook app.
   Facebook makes it relatively easy to develop an application that Facebook users can add to their profiles and pages. Facebook still has some buzz in traditional media channels, so sometimes you might even get some earned media (an editorial article written about your company) because of the interest in your new Facebook app.
5. Piggyback on someone else’s email subscriber database.
   Wouldn’t it be great to get a plug for your company in someone else’s mailing list? If you know of a company or an individual (such as a blogger) with a sizeable mailing list, offer to barter some services or products in exchange for a mention in their next email newsletter or notification. If you do have your own mailing list, you can ask another list owner to include a link to your sign-up form, or offer to add their sign-up form to your page if it seems that subscribers on each site may be interested in the other site’s content as well.   

Got more freebs? Share the wealth…let us know about your tips by posting them here. 

Email: Garth@DigitalPractices.com

* Services cited in the list above were free at the time this list was published, and have been published here as a service to readers. Some of these sites may offer fee-based options as well.

While visiting Montreal on a business trip, my wife started having a migraine after her meetings were over, so she asked a hotel desk clerk for directions to a late night pharmacy in the area. After she ventured out alone, she soon realized the directions were confusing yet she kept wandering through the streets trying to find her way. 

She had no street map, was traveling on foot, and found herself completely lost in a dark, deserted part of Montreal, far from her hotel. Cabs wouldn’t stop for her, and she didn’t even know where she was relative to her hotel. It was midnight, and she was walking past intimidating drunks and street people. 

Thankfully, she had her cellphone. She tried calling me several times, but couldn’t reach me for two hours. When she finally reached me, she was almost in tears. She said she was on Rue St-Hubert, but didn’t know the number because there were only warehouses. 

Neither of us were familiar with Montreal streets (even though I had lived there as a child), and I even thought of calling the Montreal Police to see if they could spot her and help her back to her hotel, but first I decided to look up the street using Google Maps.

 “What number are you at?” I asked, trying to stay calm. “Rue St-Hubert is a long street. I’m not sure how far away you are from the hotel.” I opened up two browser windows and searched for Rue St-Hubert on one and the hotel’s address on the other so I could see where she was in relation to the hotel. 

“It’s dark, and there are only warehouses and alleys,” she said in a panic. My wife is a university-educated healthcare professional who has worked in critical care and emergency settings, so I wasn’t accustomed to hearing her panic. “I can’t see any numbers. I’m at a dead end now.” 

That information gave me a clue. I could see a dead end on Rue St-Hubert in the general area of the hotel.  I told her to backtrack to another intersection and turn left. She was totally disoriented, and my heart was beating fast. I used to work night shifts in the hotel business, so I knew what it was like to be on the streets alone at night in a big city.  

“Just stay on the phone so people know you’re talking to someone,” I said. I remembered some other tips about avoiding danger in an urban environment. “And walk purposefully, like you know where you’re going. Don’t hesitate or look around too much.” 

As she walked, my wife told me what streets she was crossing, confirming what I was seeing on Google Maps. “You’re going in the right direction,” I said, “Just stay on that street.” At one point, a couple of drunks on the street harassed her, but she kept moving on. 

“Where are you now?” I asked, pretending to be calm. “Rue St-Dizier” she replied. “You’re getting close,” I said. Now it was about 12:30 at night, and she was all alone on the street. “I’m on Rue St-Sulpice,” she said. “You’re almost there!” I exclaimed. Suddenly she saw her hotel and knew she was safe. I hung up and breathed deeply for the first time in at least 30 minutes. 

I work in technology so I know how user-unfriendly it can be at times. But that night, when my wife was scared and alone, and all we had was a cellphone and an Internet connection, I was thankful that technology enabled me to help my wife even though I was thousands of kilometers away. I found it amazing that I could be sitting in my home on the other side of the country and still help trace my wife’s path on a map while she was walking down a dark street. 

I guess this builds a case for buying her a smart phone with a built-in GPS device for the next trip. Or maybe she could have just called the hotel to ask for help or even called the Montreal Police for a safe but embarrassed ride home. As an anxious husband, though, it was enough that I could hear her voice and trace her winding journey on a virtual map that night.

“Google may be the only company in the world,” says the Google corporate information page, “whose stated goal is to have users leave its Web site as quickly as possible.” In fact, a reported 81.9 million Web searchers per month use Google to locate content ranging from Jessica Simpson to Hurricane Katrina. Many of us don’t even bother using our bookmarks or favorites anymore-we just Google it when we need to find it.

Now that it’s so easy for people to search for anything in a fraction of a second and retrieve content buried in deep links thanks to Google and other high-speed tools such as MSN Search, is this creating a kind of laziness on the part of Web users? In the early days of the Web, we might have imagined that we’d become sophisticated online researchers in the future, but now it seems that everyone is just doing the “search lurch”: Enter a few key words, click through a few search results, and maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for in a few seconds… or maybe you’ll just give up and move on to something else. It’s like channel surfing with the remote, but on the Web.

We asked some well-known experts to comment on how our search habits are changing Web culture and even changing the way Web sites are being designed and maintained. Usability guru Dr. Jakob Nielsen founded the “discount usability engineering” movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. Jesse James Garrett is a renowned author, interface designer, and information architect. Best-selling author and content expert Gerry McGovern is widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing Web content as a business asset. Tara Calishain, an Internet researcher, is coauthor of the Google Pocket Guide and Google Hacks (O’Reilly), as well as other books on Internet searching.

Question: As the power and influence of search engines such as Google increase, will Web users bother going to homepages and trying to figure out each site’s navigation scheme? Or with our increasingly shortened attention spans and demands on our time, will we just Google everything?

Nielsen: Users have never wanted separate interaction designs on each Web site, and the associated learning overhead. That’s why it has always been a strong guideline to comply with user expectations and avoid deviant design. Search engines are simply making this trend stronger; they are not its cause. I know from user testing that one of the reasons users have been embracing search engines so warmly is as a way to liberate themselves from awkward and clumsy design on individual Web sites. One user told me: “I don’t want to navigate this information the way this Web site wants me to; I just want to go straight to the page I want, so I’m going to search for it.”  Garrett: I don’t think we should lament the passing of an era in which users had to master navigation schemes in order to use sites. In some ways, search may be the best thing that ever happened to navigation-we’re seeing lots of sites now paring their navigation back to just what’s really necessary and essential to user needs, rather than trying to cram an entire site map into the left rail on every page.

Calishain: I don’t think they’ll Google everything. I think instead what will happen-what is happening-is that standards are developing for site navigation. Users will not have to grasp new site navigation schemes since they’ll get used to going to a site and looking for the nav bar HERE and the content HERE and the search box HERE. I think people understand that search engines don’t include the entire Web. As long as that’s understood, they’ll further understand they can’t Google everything. They’ll have to explore sites.

McGovern: I think people everywhere are very impatient when they’re on the Web. If they don’t get what they’re looking for in the first page of search results, they’re not very likely to go to the second page. Very few people will use advanced search. I haven’t seen this basic pattern of behavior change in the last five years.

Q: Do you think it’s futile for site designers and information architects to struggle with developing effective navigation schemes for their sites? In other words, is search engine optimization becoming more important than navigation optimization?

Calishain: Good lord, I hope not. A truly effective navigation scheme, it seems to me, should prove effective for both a human visitor and a spidering ‘bot. The challenge is to build a structure that a ‘bot can appreciate and a human can understand, and build a vocabulary of description on your site that a human can appreciate and a ‘bot can understand. I believe these are complementary aims.McGovern: No. In my experience, there is a difference between the behavior of someone when they are on Google and when they are on an ordinary Web site. People may use Google to find a type of Web site, but then they are likely to navigate around it if it’s well-designed. They will often only resort to using search on that site if the navigation is poor.

Garrett: Navigation still has a very important role to play. First of all, there is a large audience for whom search is not their preferred method of information retrieval. Secondly, navigation helps users make connections between content elements that they might not otherwise make. Search is great when you’re looking for a particular piece of information; navigation helps you find information you didn’t know you were looking for.

Nielsen: Good navigation is still essential, especially local navigation to information in the neighborhood of the current page. First, search engines are not magic, so they don’t always lead users to exactly the right page. Sometimes users need to move around a little inside the site to zero in on the stuff they want. Second, Web sites often have additional information to offer that’s spread among multiple pages. This is especially true for B2B sites where products and services are too complex for a single product page to offer everything users want. There’s a need to navigate to whitepapers, spec sheets, and much more, and there’s also often a need to navigate between members of a product family before users can decide which one is the most appropriate for them.

Q: On the premise that Web users are already Googling more, navigating less, what would you recommend to site designers to make their sites more usable and searchable right now?

McGovern: Creating a good navigation will always be a core challenge for the Web designer. What is often forgotten is the relationship between well-organized content and search. The better organized and written your content is, the more searchable it is. And it’s not an either/or. Search and navigation needs to work in tandem, with some people using people to get to a certain part of the Web site, then using navigation to go further.Nielsen: Good usability has always been essential, since people have always left sites that were too complicated. The rise of search has simply lowered the threshold of what’s considered “too complicated” a good deal because users have nine other sites at their fingertips on the SERP [search engine results page]. There is now more of a tendency for users to dip into sites briefly for a very quick visit of 1-5 pages. As a result of this information-snacking behavior, Web sites must design to be attractive snacks and offer value for these ultra-short visits.

Calishain: If there are any pre-existing organization structures that would work on your site (organizing by date, alphabetization, card catalog number, etc.), use them. Consider using a site map. Have a Home button on each page. Put an About button somewhere, no matter how bloody obvious you think your site’s purpose is. Make sure that if someone does come to your site via Google that they have some way to quickly get to a summary of what your site is all about.

Garrett: It used to be that we could reasonably assume that most of the audience seeing a page deep in the site will have already seen the home page, a section page of some kind, and possibly some related content. As search engines become more effective, we have to acknowledge that users may not have all that context when they come to the page, and design every page as if it were the very first page the user sees in their experience of our site. The homepage is no longer the only place where we have to make a good first impression.

This article by Garth A. Buchholz was originally published by InformIT for Prentice Hall Technical Reference in 2005.